11 Major Factors For Selecting The Most Effective CRM System For Sales

Today, businesses of all sizes are in need of effective CRM
to help boost their sales.

Every CRM software promises to fulfill the major
requirements of a sales team such as closing more deals and managing customer
relationships better.

But you must understand that your business may have some
unique requirements and so do other businesses out there in the market. Also,
not all CRM products available in the market will be equally suitable for your
requirements.

With all these factors taken into account, how can you
evaluate which CRM works the best for your sales department?

First off…

Take a CRM cheat sheet and note down the list of factors that you don’t want in your system and extract to choose the ones you need.

This process of choosing CRM software through a cheat sheet
has been a great success for many organizations and has helped them to
streamline their CRM search.

Here we present important factors that will aid in selecting
the best CRM software for your sales department.

1. User-friendly and Easy to Set Up

Do you need external operators to run sales CRM for you or you need a couple of weeks to get the knowledge on how the CRM software really works? Or you need a consultant to help set up your CRM system?

Forget about it now.

Customer relationship management software was built so that
sales representatives can focus more on selling and prospecting. However, many
managers pick up a CRM without knowing how it can benefit their business and
thrusting them upon their sales representatives.

The impact is the business leaders end up purchasing an
expensive, low quality tool that hinders team productivity significantly.

The truth is, effective sales teams are very clear about
their preferences. They want a system that they can use easily.

Most effective CRM platforms provide its customers with a
free trial ranging from 15 days to one month. But, this is invaluable when you
are running a small business trying to figure out ways to manage sales.

Try to use this period of time in order to let your team
explore the software such as, whether the user interface is intuitive enough
for capturing new leads from emails or do they still need to keep entering leads
manually, or how often the team needs support.

2. Creating Reports Quickly

Every sales representative in your team needs to know what
are the things they have done right and what are the aspects that they need to
improve on. But how can a CRM make it easy for your team to create reports?

Identify your need for analytics and a system’s range of
capabilities for generating reports and other useful information in order to
find the right CRM match.

Look for a CRM system that has standard pre-made reports as
well as customizable reports so that your organization can get tailored
analytics specific to each situation.

3. Examining Customer Behavior

Today, businesses can trace the digital behavior data left
behind by their customers to identify the pattern and use it to ascertain the
customer’s interests in the product.

A cloud-based CRM software helps you to track and monitor
customer behavior to gain complete visibility into your client’s entire sales
track. This will help your team to have relevant conversations with perspective
customers.

It is important to keep in mind that these sales conversations with your customers can make a major difference between a deal won and a deal lost.

Let’s find out how sales CRM receive customer data in
seconds.

Someone visits your website and takes a look at product
pages that are integrated with the CRM and fills out a web form. Just after
this step, they pop up as a new lead in the CRM system with their activity
clearly captured.

4. Integrating with External Applications

Bringing numerous tools under one roof is the main purpose
behind integrations so clients can get a greater number of apps to merge
together in less time and without much effort from your side.

For example, when your CRM integrates with Google Docs, it
automatically synchronizes files into your system. You can edit, search, and
save actions on the documents directly from the CRM software.

5. No More Repetitive Tasks

Many salespeople are spending more time on tedious tasks and
entering data manually into the CRM system rather than spending time on
selling.

In order not to get caught in the same cycle, here are few ways
to automate your CRM system for sales.

Workflow Process (turning prospects into customer when the deal is won)

Assign Leads to Sales Team by Territory

Bulk Emailing

6. Mobile CRM

Mobile CRM

Employees are no longer tied behind their desks. They have to travel a lot and keep working on the go. Thanks to the rise of remote working.

Sales teams have to meet with new prospects and need to
visit diverse locations in between office hours. Employees working in the field
also need access to their work.

A mobile CRM application ensures that customers receive the
best experience all the time. Employees on the road receive important
information from any smart device and get real-time updates so that they can
provide the customers with relevant information whenever and wherever required
at any speed.

Also, they can manage schedules, access important data, create
reports, and organize files all in a single and secure location.

7. Price That Fits Your Budget Easily

Businesses spend a lot of money on choosing a CRM but gradually end up investing in some other tools such as customer behavior tracking, lead scoring, and marketing automation as sometimes the system may lack some of these above functionalities.

So, when selecting a CRM software solution, make sure that
the tool is doing all of the hard work and not shooting over the budget
expenses.

Organizations never want to spend large sums of money just
in the process. Maintaining the balance between affordable pricing and key
features is hard, but not impossible.

8. Single Packaging

Ask yourself what you want- a single tool to capture all
leads, send emails, generate reports, track and monitor customer behavior, make
calls.

Write down the features that you don’t want- maintaining
excel spreadsheets, manually entering data, etc.

What is the solution?

Search for an effective CRM system that will provide you
with the basic requirements such as sending bulk emails for running campaigns,
reporting, lead scoring, tracking customer activity, placing calls instantly
from the CRM system, and more.

9. Managing Deals Efficiently

A CRM software gives you the ability to visualize your sales pipeline whereas through excel spreadsheets
you are unable to view the pipeline.

Although you can list your deals in spreadsheets, still you
are unable to get the context behind every deal such as the conversations you
have had with customer and the number of deals you expect to close by the end
of every month.

With the help of CRM, you can get all the above. You can
find out the number of new deals won and lost. The information is stored in the
pipeline view and deals are arranged from left to right. It has separate
columns that represent the particular stage of the deal while capturing your
pipeline entirely. It is easier for you to send emails and make calls to
specific pipeline stages.

When your business has different sales process for various
products, you will like the numerous sales pipelines that CRMs provide.

10. CRM for Customer Support

Businesses use CRM in excellent customer support

Sales CRM software also includes features that customer
support representatives are looking for.

When customer support representatives are well informed
about all previous contact and issues that a customer is having, customers gain
a higher sense that they are being taken care of by your company and are more
likely to remain a client.

CRM solutions give the insight that businesses need to keep
their customers happy.

11. Customize Your CRM software

Customizable CRMs allow an organization to tailor the
experience to their own, changing theme colors and adding the company logo
gives sales and other users a sense of company spirit that gives employees the
passion to succeed in their roles.

Customizable dashboards allow individuals to see data that
is most important to them in one central location and can be modified based on
the user’s requirements.

Conclusion

A simple customer relationship management system ensures
that it fulfills all your essential requirements such as managing clients effectively,
providing suitable training to your department, tracking customer interactions,
and more.

When you start prioritizing your CRM requirements, it will
help you to boost overall business effectiveness and return on investment.

Your sales team can sell smarter, make better decisions that
can guide the organization in the best direction, and stay in the loop by never
dropping the ball.

A good CRM system such as SutiCRM helps your sales team to save hours, money, and effort by stopping redundant duplicate manual data entry so they can focus on their main purpose of making sales.

Keeping all these factors in mind will help the entire sales
department to enhance revenue, faster sales cycle, and higher pipeline
visibility.

I am the CEO of Entrepreneur Business Blog, Chief Evangelist of Ebusinessroom Ventures, Lead Coach of The Excellent Entrepreneurs' Network (TEEN) and Convenor of #NaijaSitUp.
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